Beijing Official Calls for New Push to Find and Arrest Protest Leaders

A Communist Party official warned Friday that more than a month after the bloody military assault on pro-democracy demonstrators around Tian An Men Square, “counterrevolutionary” resistance persists, official Chinese newspapers reported.

At a meeting of senior Beijing officials, Li Qiyan, the capital’s Communist Party deputy secretary, called for fresh efforts to isolate and smash remnants of the democracy movement.

He said protest organizers are still at large “distributing anti-revolutionary rumor,” despite a wave of arrests, and that “their capture is of vital importance to the survival of the party, the stability of the society and the fundamental interest of the people,” according to a report in the official People’s Daily.

China has announced the capture of only six of 21 most-wanted student leaders, and several are believed to have escaped abroad.

Also on Friday, Chinese authorities, stepping up a campaign against Western influences, seized foreign newspapers and magazines from bookshops at luxury hotels in the capital.

Managers at 10 five-star hotels said agents of the Central Propaganda Bureau raided the bookshops and told the hotels that they would no longer receive foreign publications.

“They even took away the shelves,” said an assistant manager at the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel.

Last week, authorities ordered deluxe hotels to stop receiving satellite transmissions of foreign broadcasts and raided bookstalls selling the works of pro-democracy leaders.

In another development, Western companies were largely absent from an international trade fair, touted as China’s biggest ever, that opened Friday in Beijing. In contrast to previous such events, the United States, Britain, Canada, West Germany and France had only one booth each. Many Western countries imposed sanctions against China in protest of the crackdown.

Nonetheless, the official New China News Agency noted that 24 nations exhibited, and it said the “festive and friendly atmosphere at the fair did not seem to be affected by the martial law still going on in the city.”